Step Back a Little,

I Think I Skipped a Step...

Ok, so I have recently been made aware that I never really put any kind of good description of where in the world i am or what the culture is like around me. Wow, I suck. I have also been made aware how bad my typing is. This I fully blame on this stupid French keyboard. It may take me twice as long, but I will try to make this one a bit more... aesthetically pleasing? My other motive is that I have a project that should be up to be funded any day now, and I really want you all to care about my community as much as I do. No, more than I do, cause you dont have to hear the roosters at 530 in the morning.

So here is (maybe the first installment of) a quality description of some background on where I am at.

Ok so my village is one of several Louly's. 'Louly' is the way the french spell it though on a map I am convinced was made by pirates, I saw it written as 'Luli'. Anyway, I have counted seven thus far though they seem to have nothing else in common except proximity. They are not even all Seereer, and some are so spread out, like mine, that they have different 'quartiers', or seperate sections with their own name. My Louly is Ngogom, meaning roughly, the house of Ngom, though there is only one Ngom family in the village and they dont really seem paticularly special. Nice guy though. The village is spread over about two kilometers east to zest (gaa! zhy is the w down there!), and a little over a kilometer north to south. Most of the village is ethnically Seereer and speak a dialect of the Seereer dialect Sin called Seereer Jegeem. The Seereers themselves have undoubtably an interesting history, though I have only gathered little bits and pieces of it. 'Seereer' supposedly means 'keepers of the temples' in antient Egyptian, and the people themselves are nomads that left to seek more exciting shores. They settled in the Sin-Saloum delta (just south of where I am) many hundreds of years ago, and established a kingdom. They had a line of rulers in a place right next door to where I spent a week of training. I even visited the kings' burial ground where they were suposedly under these mounds, buried standing, with all their possesions and perhaps also wives and husbands (at least the first king was actually a queen). It was a pretty spooky place. Then, some few hundred years ago, there was an invasion from the north as the area was converted to Islam. The Seereers were rather stubornly against the whole deal and were driven out and scattered. Later, when the heat died down and the Animist jokes started to get old (if the sky wills it), they returned and set up more humble towns and villages. Some converted to Christianity when the toubabs, err, French came and colonized the area. The Seereers in my area were not paticularly into the whole colonialization thing and thought it a rather bad deal. As I am told they formed a resistance tribe and fought and hid from the foreigners, calling themselves 'Jegeeram', meaning 'they dont own me'. This is shortened to the 'Seereer Jegeem' that they now still call themselves, err, well, call their dialect.

Other interesting facts- Seereers and Puulars generally have a joking relationship of mutual distate for one another. I have never really gotten a clear explaination of their combined history, certainly the languages are similar but the people even look different. Puulars, as I call them, are various different groups of people not just around Senegal (mostly in the far north, east and south), but are also in many other west african countries as well. The Seereers call them 'slaves' and the Puulars call Seereers 'cats', which i imagine give some clues to thier past relationships, but then, I cant be sure.

My village has three Puular families. One lives in the central area of town near me. The father insists on calling me 'Mousa' everytime, even when the rest of the village corrects him. The other two families live up in the northern section on their own. As one expects from Puulars, they have a large herd of cows (the largest around), and many goats and sheep. In my opinion they are the nicest people in the whole village to me and insist that I learn Puular. I think I get this impression for two reasons, one is that they are super isolated group in a sea of Seereers and so they are extra nice to me when i come visit. Secondly, I think that with some of them, their Seereer is about on par with my level of Seereer and so we can have easy, slow and nice conversations. I like them.

The other forty-seven families are Seereer. Most in the village and in the area are Muslim, but about a third of my village is Catholic. Instead of the usual Arabic-cally derived name like Mamadou, Seikh or Abibou, the Catholics tend to have two first names, one French, like Piere or Francois, and the other a traditionally Seereer name like Diogoye (lion) or Ndigue (rainy season).

Agriculture is really the main activity and work in the village. We are surrounded by fields. Much of time, in the dry season, these stand dry, sandy and empty, but when the rains come (as some of my pictures showed last year) it really greens up. Around me is a fair amount of Baobab, but also a good many different variaties of Acacia trees, those classic african savanna thin trees with tiny leaves and thin canopy. It is very flat where I am, and generally rather sandy, but the water table is near the surface so water is not too much of a problem.

Millet is the big main crop in my area. It grows looking kinda like corn (alas corn needs more water or better soil than we have), and developes candle like tops an inch or more in diameter and a foot or two long with hundreds of little beads, kernels if you will, of millet. They tend not to sell much of this as it is a crop they can store all year, eat all year and plant the leftovers with some to spare in the next season. Peanuts are also a big crop around me as well as beans (like black-eyed peas) and sorghum (grows like corn again but has a more grain-looking top part that then grow kernels similar to millet (i am sure you can google it (i will take pictures next time))). My village has a ton of gardens too, thirty seven by my count, and nearly, if not every, family has one to work on or help with. Bissap is a big crop around me, both green and red varieties, and it is used for a cranberry like drink and for a sauce from the leaves. To some extent people also manage fruit trees like mango and lemon, and grow eggplant, cassava, peppers and okra. The local cows generally roam about eating weeds and cleaning up stalks from the fields durring the dry season and then are relocated to areas to roam a ways to the east of us, near Kaolack, durring the rainy season. There are also sheep and goats in small herds in my village and chickens galore. These animals are not tipically eaten unless there is some special holiday, but are kept for a kind of solid financial asset. Most families keep a horse and/or a donkey for field work and for transport and such.

The village has five main wells people use to get water from for everyday needs like drinking, washing and bathing. There is a four room primary school and a kindergarten. The kindergarten sits in a field next to the one room church and recently both have been encircled by a brick and chain-link fence. I guess you gotta pen those little tikes in... that or protect the church from witches... There is also a small Koranic (so sure that is spelled wrong) school that teaches the young children their Arabic prayers and such. There is a tire-repair shop (a guy with an air pump some rubber tubing and a hammer) and a boutique. The boutique sells many wonderful things such as rice, oil, tea and sugar, matches and powdered milk, soap and an assortment of small terrible biscuits.

My family is perhaps one of the more well off in the village. My father is currently the vice-president of the Rural Comunity (kinda like the county, I guess). He is a really nice guy with two wives and more children than I have been able to determine. The oldest being perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties and the youngest was born just before I came to country last year. My younger mom has only had two children and I doubt she is anywhere near done. My dads younger brother lives in Spain and a bunch of his children and his second wife live with us too. Both my dads mom and his younger mom live in our compound as well along with at least one adopted child, my dads younger sister and her one child. It took me a while to get all of the names right. We have a horse and a recently purchased (or maybe borrowed) donkey. When I first came my dad proudly showed me a room where he was raising a good little bunch of chickens but since selling them all, that room has been empty and we simply have a little brick coop and wandering fowl that drive me nuts.

Folks around me generally eat a lot of millet. They pound it in a long and tiresome process that turns it into a grainy powder that is mixed with another powder (ours is pounded baobab leaves) and cooked into a kind of couscous. It has the consistency of warm wet sand when it is eaten, and at first i thought the texture awful, but i guess it grows on you, eh? They eat this for breakfast, sometimes with milk. Where I am it is usually the powdered variety, but since the Puulars have cows and do sell a kind of yogurt at the market every once in a while, I imagine they may also get fresh milk. For lunch, it is mostly the same all over the country. I understand that some time around colonialization or a little before or after, local lunch foods, whatever they were, based on local grains or other veggies, were overwhelmingly thrown out in favor of the rice that was imported as a time saving foodstuff. Thusly, I, with many other volunteers, 'enjoy' rice and fish for lunch every single day. Sometimes this is suplemented by small amounts of vegetables, but oily rice and fish is pretty standard. For dinner we have the couscous again but with a sauce, usually made from peanut or, if I am having a good day, beans.

Oh gosh, this post is getting way long and I should go ahead and end it. Well, I will totally have more of these 'steps back', if anyone wants to know anything in paticular, let me know.

Oh, and Jared posted pictures of me at Goree island (they are really really silly, but go see (I forgot my own camera, sorry))!!

The Year Mark

Such a long time since a good entry, eh?

I have been here in Senegal for over a year now. It doesnt really feel like it has been that long, but then again, it feels like I have been here ages and have learned way more than I had thought possible.

It really has been a good, interesting, stressful and life changing year. I have taken a long, long weekend in Dakar, seeing friends and relaxing in a place with hot showers before I head back to my little hut. The latrine project that I am sponsoring in the village is now in the phase where we all wait expectantly and hope magic happens. The proposal was completed and sent off to Washington last friday and now PC is chewing on it before it can appear up on their website. Once it is up there I will, definetly, let everyone know it. I am really excited, it is an expensive project and the world economy is what it is, but i think if only some of the people I know give jsut a little, it can really add up. Not to mention, that it can change the lives of some 600+ people, making their days healthier, easier, and I think, just a little happier.

That being said, I feel like this project may be the most I do durring my service. The most of anything that can last at least. My environmental club has met a few times now. We have played a couple games, talked about what the environment is and how we can affect it, looked at national geographic pictures of other ecosystems and the like. But then still, I am not sure that they really follow me that much. Slowly slowly I guess. i also know that this year I am going to try and do a really big tree nursury and do a big outplanting at the start of the rainy season (with the help of the club). I have been colecting seeds from many different local species that people use for mostly for feul-wood, fence making and feeding animals, and also other varieties that have medicinal value, fruit or other edibles, and some that are just good shade trees. People generally like to have trees in their gardens and even in their fields and some varieties can be very benificial to the surrounding soil. The village seems very excited about it and have given me suggestions and seeds for planting and right now I am preparing a large area of sacks in my back yard and will, if i can get it protection, do another large area behind the school. I know that many of these probably wont survive a year, some will be eaten by goats or cows or get trampled or simply dry up and die, but i feel like it is one of those great classic PC type ways to make a modest lasting impact. I could maybe come back years from now, sit under a tree and eat a mango from a tree i helped plant. That would be way cool.

I really am very excited for this coming year. I really cant believe I only will have another year of this. Lots of volunteers have had different feelings about their service and PC life and all. Lots of volunteers come with different expectations and perspectives and with different goals and understandings of our purpose and take different ideas from similar situations. I could not be more thoroughly satisfied with my decision to come here and have the greatest job on the planet. I get to live in a totally new environment, learn a new language and do things that I could only dream of back at home.

The work here is hard, to be sure, but i dont think i would rather be doing anything else. The Peace Corps is not perfect and sometimes i do feel sometimes as if nothing i do could ever come to any good. I feel like i do so much time learning language and integrating that when it comes down to getting things done, half my service has flown by. Being a volunteer also means, usually, well for me at least, being rather independent. I have a 'boss' but i dont really have anyone telling me what i should work on or what i should be experimenting with or what would be most fulfilling. I have general guidelines for the type of volunteer that I am (Environmental education), but i am free to delve into most anything i can imagine, including work that other sectors do (latrines are health, and tree plantings are agro-forestry). I often have to be a little creative for getting certain things done or deciding what i could best spend my time on (working with another volunteer on an excellent Seereer dictionary). As short of a time that I have here I do hope that I am making it worth it for my village and myself.

Before I came here I had never really given sufficient thought to any philosophies of development work. I had just thought, there are good things you can do for people in need, these things can be done, people will be helped. period. Now i am begining to see the bigger, much more complex and often frustrating problems. I think the PC program has a great approach to developement, not that it can do everything, or hit every area of the problem. But it is unique, and connects cultures and people in amazing ways. Important PC goals in fact, involve, and I think properly, the cross-cultural exchange. There is so much I could say about all of this, but i will save it for a speech later.

As independent as we volunteers are, I also feel that I big part of getting me through this year has been our support system. Care-packages are amazing, the food and the magazines are like nothing else. Hearing from people back home lets me know the rest of the world really is still out there and that there are people who have not forgotten me to the other side of the globe. But also there is nothing that can substitute the friends I have made over here, both close neighbors and volunteers from around the country. That we can get together and actually breathe for a little while every now and then has probably played a good role in keeping me level, motivated and positive over an oftentimes very stressful job.

I really do love it here. It has taken its time to grow on me, but i really love my village. And, if I havent emphasized this already, I have the best language too (as long as you dont count most useful or prettiest sounding under 'best'). I am so excited for this next year. I am excited for this next month and for all of the potential that I see in my village and in the people there. I only hope that at the very least I can continue to entertain those in my village, yoona fo mi?

I leave this with a good quote that I was sent just the other day:

-You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future. - Thomas Sankara